In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. "I loved being a gatherer," Huffington would later say. "I don't really think you can make gathering mistakes."

Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. "Arianna," he says, "can make weak ties into strong ties."

He returned to New York to discover that Lerer was already a few steps ahead of him. He wanted to talk about the venture the three of them would embark upon. "I remember him saying things like, 'We don't want to build a big website,'" Peretti would recall. "'We want to build an influential site.'"

Sort of related: there's an interesting article to be written about Google's relationship with blogs. Early on, blogs provided Google's Pagerank algorithm with plenty of links to rank (I would argue that without blogs and the personal web, Pagerank simply wouldn't have worked...businesses didn't link to anyone but themselves at that time) and then a few years later, with Huffington Post leading the charge, blogs filled Google with all sorts of crap and nonsense that made it less useful.